Valve Fans Rampage After Game Fails To Hold... A Halloween Event

Valve normally runs cute little Halloween events for some of its games. Team Fortress 2 gets Scream Fortress, for example, while DOTA 2 had Diretide. Oh, except for this year. And boy are people upset.

Once Halloween came and went with no announcement of a Diretide for 2013, fans of the game went nuts. The game’s forums were hammered by requests and concerns over the absence, to the point where any and all threads even mentioning the word “Diretide” are being removed by mods.

And that’s just for starters. The mob, outraged, then turned their attentions to other matters. One dumb sentence brought up repeatedly was “daed gaem, Volvo pls fix!”, leading people to start posting on Volvo’s — yes, the car company — Twitter, Facebook and even Reddit communities asking/complaining about the lack of Diretide, a move helped along with a Tweet by DOTA 2 commentator Toby Dawson:

@TobiWanDOTA we certainly haven’t missed that the people want Diretide, but is @DOTA2 listening?

To their credit, the car company has taken it all in their stride, even posting their “support” for DOTA 2 “fans” on their Facebook page.

Moving on from a Swedish car manufacturer, the mob has also gone and bombed DOTA 2’s Metacritic page, bringing its user score down to 4.2 (it used to be 8+, but I know, user score, whatever). Users have also gone after the Facebook page of President Obama.

Many involved claim that their actions are justified not because Valve has failed to run the event, but because of the company’s supposed lack of communication surrounding its absence.

I did enjoy actually playing the game for a while but found that the community was unbearable. Due to the fact that a single team member can destroy a team's chances, it is so easy to start raging. Combined with the fact that a game can drag on for an eternity if the other team wants to simply kill farm, I can understand why people get so angry, I know I did.

But this is beyond people being dicks during games and just a community being entitled.

Its one thing if it was announced and nothing happened but they didn't announce it so what were they expecing. Some people think they are entitled to everything. BF4 servers are crap. Do you see me bitching to Volvo about it?

No the event has been noted as a "annual" event. I do not advocate what the dota 2 community is doing, but when Valve is not going to communicate to the community that makes the game what it is, then valve is asking for this to happen.

Funny you say "the community that makes the game what it is", it seems like that's the first part Valve should be cutting loose on their next round of bug fixes. "The community" only seems to be holding the game back, certainly not helping it.

Wow, when a friend told me a few years ago that Valve has the worst fans in the world I didn't believe him. Can't believe this is actually happening. Have Valve made any official statement about this or will they remain silent?

Well, the TF2 thing has had an issue. Despite Valve saying months in advance that community-created Halloween items would be limited to being worn on Halloween/full moon, there's still widespread bitching about it. Sometimes Valve can't win.

Of course, putting in a My Little Pony hat and putting new voicelines for it ticked off a few people as well. Ah, gamers. Never change.

It'd be great if the reason they didn't do any halloween stuff is because they are super busy working on Half Life 3.... But that's very doubtful. Much like cures for cancer and aids I doubt we'll see HL3 in our lifetimes...

No love for CSGO and the Chickens with sheets over them to look like ghosts, or the kill can with the occasional whispy fellow coming out of the person who killed you? It might be why there was no DotA event, they were too busy working on the GO one.

God damn terrible. The community has NOTHING to gain from this, and Valve have nothing to apologise for. Only winners are Volvo. Hell, as much of a fallacy labelling by association is, this only reflects poorly on gaming communities as a whole. ugh.

while yes, all of the spamming is fucking stupid, saying the community was mad over one event isn't true, most people are mad that there hasn't been a substantial update for 4 months, no new heroes, the best we got was a big balance patch a few weeks ago.

this diretide thing was just the tipping point for a lot of people, which quickly got out of hand.

Reading the article, I assumed the fans were just over reacting on purpose as they probably just find it funny. Reading the comments here though, you guys all think they are dead serious about this? If so, that is pretty pathetic.

Unlikely. You see anything funny about bringing down the user score for a game? (yea user score, whatever), but its clear that the act is more malicious than you'd like to think. And really, do you think it is beyond gamers nowadays to go this far? It shouldn't be surprising.

Alternatively, the way to look at this is that a bunch of people got annoyed... but then a bunch MORE people saw ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE, especially at Volvo, thought it was hilarious and it just went viral from there.

I spent a good 20 minutes lolling at random ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Give DIRETIDE threads from people who largely just seemed to be doing it for the lulz rather than as a result of any actual outrage. It's the Internet. It happens.